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Ky trip, part the second

As it turns out, blogging from here is no picnic, even though my parents have high-speed internet, which has not always been the case. The main impediment to blogging from here is: DANIEL. He sleeps in the room with the computer, so I can't be in here after he's asleep. And the other problem is that every. single. time. I want to get online to check my email and read the news he's clamoring for a turn. I can take the insistent pleas for him to use the computer (he likes a couple youtube videos, but he can also write an email and work the DVD player) for about 3 minutes before I lose my patience with the whining, at which point I either let him have a turn, or put the computer to sleep so no one will use it.

It's REALLY annoying.

Not only that, but the kids, as good as they are, have been thrown completely off routine by this trip. It's worse than usual, for some reason. Every night at least one, if not both, has stayed up until 10:00 or later. It's a combination of unexpected or late naps, the fact that we should have changed our clocks back to standard time a couple weeks ago, and the fact that we moved one time zone east when we drove here. One night Daniel wasn't asleep until almost midnight, and he was a complete disaster the next day.

Despite kooky sleeping habits, though, we are having a really good time and, for the most part, decent weather. We did our trick-or-treating a day early. The downtown businesses had trick-or-treating Friday afternoon (they didn't do it on Halloween this year because banks and such wouldn't have been open on Saturday), so I dressed Daniel and Anya in their costumes...

...and took them to Main Street. Yeah, you can see it wasn't easy getting them to pose for pictures. Daniel, in case you can't tell, was a goat. He was dressed in brown from head to toe with floppy gray felt ears, a brown tail and black horns reclaimed from an ancient childhood puppet I found in the basement. Anya was a little black kitty cat. I knit her hat and tail, and she has little white mitts, too, but it was about 80 degrees on Friday (unusually warm even here), so I didn't try to put them on her. I'm afraid even the hats didn't last too long.

Daniel's favorite part of Halloween, though, was handing out the candy to trick-or-treaters last night. They came in droves, and the 100+ pieces of candy I bought for the occasion were gone within 45 minutes. He and his Oma sat outside on the porch next to a glowing jack-o-lantern with their funny hats (my mom wore a horned viking helmet strongly reminiscent of a certain Wagnerian character, and Daniel had his goat hat on), handing out candy, one each to the costumed kids that came by. I was inside making pizza, and Anya fell asleep on my dad at 6:00 (I told you the sleeping was jacked up!)

We made another trip to Evan's Orchard this afternoon, taking advantage of the sunny weather. No school buses on Sundays, you know. Oh, how I wish I could have stopped and taken some pictures along the way! Kentucky countryside, when not spattered with litter, is just beautiful, and it doesn't get much better than the drive out to that orchard. But there's no shoulder on that little road, and the kids wouldn't have had the patience for picture-taking anyway, so you'll just have to believe me that black fences and rolling green hillsides and black tobacco barns and those old, old stone walls from before Emancipation create scenery that will take your breath away.

The other major event of the weekend is my mom's birthday today. Wish her a good one!